by Fiona Moore

Courtesy of my friends at Royal Holloway’s student and staff film club, I’ve been able to see two horror films recently released in the UK, which will soon have their stateside debut. One is a little patchy but still provides entertainment for the horror fan; the other is already being rightly hailed as a classic of British horror cinema.

Torture Garden

Torture Garden is an anthology movie, a subgenre I quite like as it allows the chance to show shorter, more compact narratives along a particular theme. This one, also, is written by Robert Bloch, a master of short, wickedly pointed, stories.

Through the framing device of a carnival horror-show hosted by Doctor Diabolo (Burgess Meredith), who offers customers a glimpse of their possible sinister fates, this film brings us four narratives linked by a common theme of people being driven by desire or ambition to commit horrible deeds. In the first, a man (Michael Bryant), desperately in debt, murders his uncle (Maurice Denham) to get his hands on his inheritance, only to find out that his uncle’s source of income is more supernatural and sinister than he believed. In the second, an ambitious film starlet (Beverly Adams) learns that Hollywood is, in fact, run by literal immortals, and is given the chance to join them. In the third, a celebrity pianist (John Standing) becomes the object of a rivalry between his fiancée (Barbara Ewing) and a possessed piano. In the final story, a Poe collector (Jack Palance) finds that a rival enthusiast (Peter Cushing) has managed to capture the ultimate piece of Poe memorabilia—the undead writer himself.

As the above should indicate, the film has an excellent cast, and is produced by Milton Subotsky, whom readers of this journal should remember from the two Doctor Who movies. Amicus, the production company, has form on producing anthology movies, having put out Doctor Terror’s House of Horrors three years ago. The strongest segments are the first and last, with the first story featuring a credibly demonic cat, and the final one providing a wry metaphor for the way in which collectors—and fans—enter into exploitative relationships with writers.

The film unfortunately lacks the cohesion of the best anthology movies. While, as I noted, there’s a linking theme between the episodes, it doesn’t particularly connect to the framing story, and, while it shares the concept with Doctor Terror’s House of Horrors of people being shown how to avoid a disastrous fate, the “twist” at the end is nowhere near as clever as the one in the earlier movie. The Hollywood segment is poorly characterised, full of excuses to show women in their underwear, and has an antisemitic subtext that made me rather uncomfortable (I suspect that Bloch, himself of Jewish ancestry, was trying to satirise the idea of a Jewish cabal running Hollywood, but it doesn’t quite manage to convey the right tone). While I quite like the concept of a sentient piano becoming attached to its owner, it’s difficult to find its attacks on its human rival anything other than ridiculous. Two and a half out of five stars.

The Devil Rides Out

Based on a novel by Dennis Wheatley, produced by current kings of the UK horror scene Hammer Films, and starring Christopher Lee, The Devil Rides Out is a much more polished and focused production.

Lee plays Nicholas, Duc de Richelieu, who, together with his friend Rex van Ryn (Leon Greene) has come to the UK to visit his late friend’s son Simon (Patrick Mower), in whom he takes an avuncular interest, only to learn that Simon has fallen in with a Satanic cult. The story follows de Richelieu and van Ryn’s efforts to rescue Simon and a young female cultist named Tanith (Nike Arrighi) from the clutches of Satanic priest Morcata (Charles Gray). Adapted by Richard Matheson, the plot is a fairly straightforward one of (supernatural) good versus (supernatural) evil, without any of the twists and ironies of many recent horror movies, and, much as I enjoy those, I also found the narrative here refreshing and satisfying.

Simon is played by a newcomer on the scene, Patrick Mower, who is certainly one to watch; although handsome and strong-jawed, he has a sinister quality which makes the idea of him falling in with Satanists believable. It’s good to see Christopher Lee playing a hero for once, escaping his usual typecasting as a monster, even if the chemistry between him and Charles Gray isn’t quite as compelling as that between him and Peter Cushing. There is a very well-done giant spider effect at one point, and fans of vintage cars will be delighted by all the 1920s and 1930s roadsters on display. There are elements of the new folk-horror genre in the scenes of English cultists cavorting in the woods of Hampshire.

Less positively, the film draws some associations between non-White people and Satanism that left me rather uncomfortable: the heroes are all English (and upper-class), but the cult boasts African and Indian members, and, when a demon is summoned at one point, it takes the form of a grinning, pop-eyed and semi-clad Black man. The spider aside, some of the effects are rather unconvincing, and the cult has so many members that one wonders how it manages to keep itself secret. There’s a slight hint of the exploitation genre that seems unfortunately popular now, and the fact that the youth in question aren’t inherently evil but are being led astray by an older person (and need to be rescued by another older person) doesn’t do much to mitigate that.

Nonetheless, this is Hammer on good form, providing a strong narrative with a satisfying conclusion and a lot of credible shocks and tension. The combination of good source material with a competent screenplay and plenty of talent behind and in front of the camera is a sure winner. Four out of five stars.

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